What took them so long?
Anyway. I’m sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.
Adapt to what?
If they’re mixing the content with the ads server side, it’s going to be like trying to extract the flour from the bread loaf.
I’ve never understood why they haven’t just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it’s harder to target them client side.
I mean, the dream is to make the Internet like cable television, isn’t it? Where it’s all one signal/stream. When ads could never be targeted and blocked or skipped unless you recorded and played back later with fast forward. Feels like we’ll get there eventually, with Chromium effectively calling the shots now.
If they’re predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they’re not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you’d need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
I think it’s more like extracting raisins? ad contents are still separate from the dough. finding the boundary conditions or ads hashes is guaranteed to work. whether it is feasible for adblockers is a different matter yet.
Not really. Because there are no boundary conditions. Videos are not streamed as a one big file, they’re streamed as small chucks, like 5-10 seconds short chunks. Replace one chunk content randomly on the back-end with an ad and no ad blocker will be able to spot it.
I’ve never understood why they haven’t just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it’s harder to target them client side.
The value that Google has always provided as an ad platform is that they’re targeted ads. You can target estimated age, geographic location, gender, estimated income. You can target your ads so narrowly that only a single person ever gets them even.
To bake ads into the actual content stream they have to expend compute editing and re-rendering the video for as many times as they have ads that they intend to run on those videos. They can do it once with once batch of ads but then it’s only as targeted as who clicks on that video. Realistically they’ll want to do it 5x, 10x or more per video (and store every copie of the video, unless there’s some tech to store it as segments and seamlessly stitch then together as a single stream) to continue targeting the ads which gets very expensive fast
They absolutely will. There are far more people (and probably smarter people to boot) working on blocking their shit than there are people at Google working on making it unblockable.
This is an arms race where they will win the occasional battle, but always lose the war.
Introducing our new surveillance-based, dynamically generated, native sponsored video ads with mandatory interactive minigame engagement.
Careful - if we ever detect evasion, that’s a lifetime IP ban.
Careful - if we ever detect evasion, that’s a lifetime IP ban.
And lose out on any potential future profits? Probably not. Especially if the IP is dynamic.
It’s technically complicated, and requires more compute to do it server side.
Index the content of the ads, identify it, and drop that data from the served video file? There may be a more clever solution, but that’d definitely work. It should be possible to checksum or just straight up store the data for the first couple of kilobytes of video data that would uniquely identify each ad.
Youtube obviously must have a rota of however many ads which they can display, so eventually they’d all get identified although you’d be playing whack-a-mole forever as they release new ones. Isn’t Sponsorblock partially crowdsourced anyway?
This would be challenging and fairly expensive, but worth it if you were motivated by sufficient spite.
They say the ad is being integrated straight into the video stream on the server side though. It won’t be its own identifiable piece of data on the client side anymore.
Except with AI what’s to stop the advertisers from dynamically generating ads on the fly that are just ever so different from the original so as to throw off this kind of blocking.
Don’t ads need to be legally highlighted as being ads in many countries?
Would make detection easy.
Do you really want your ad blocker to do a resource intense image detection over a video stream in real time? Your PC will start fucking fuming.
Perhaps the ads could be fingerprinted the same way Shazam fingerprints songs
Even if it comes down to a browser addon placing a black rectangle over the video and muting browser audio when an ad plays, I’ll be choosing that over watching ads.
I’ve done something similar by mixing two extensions together in times where unlock origin wasn’t keeping up with YT changes (ad muting extension plus auto skip extension). It worked really well for when you had the video in the background of a game or work, and if I were solely watching the video it was just a trigger for a phone break during the video
Image Recognition could attatch the first frame of an ad to the length of time the ad plays for, then add it to an online DB a la sponserblock.
They might try to block seeking during these sections, but YouTube usually has raw mp4 streams available under the hood. You can even pull them using invidious or newpipe. Take that out and we might be fucked.
A good way to block this kind of thing is just to use DRM. Most platforms now provide a completely blocked off and secure hardware DRM solution that makes it impossible to grab video frames or view decrypted data in any way from the host operating system or any app running on it.
Ripping the video segments would just give you encrypted and useless data without the license.
These kinds of systems would need to be attacked by HDMI or other downstream hacks, or an HD video camera pointed at the screen in a dark room :)
Product review video, blocked. Product is mentioned in a video, blocked. Product is shown too long, blocked.
“AI” isn’t smart enough to do it and it would require your computer to be powerful enough to not convert videos to PowerPoints.
I wouldn’t even mind the ads if they just played maybe one per three or four videos. That would still bring in a massive amount of money without pissing everyone off.
Instead we get up to two ads every couple of minutes.
It’s all about blatant greed.
Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).
If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately.
The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.
So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.
Now scale that up to millions.
The Fediverse isn’t trying to do anything remotely like that.
This specific example is one thing that self hosting is arguably better for. I’ve made a few shitposting memes and the like that are five seconds long and uploaded unlisted just to share with friends that get immediately flagged and banned for DMCA that I’ve taken to just self hosting them. They’re getting like three views anyway because the world was never meant to see them.
People sharing videos with friends and family seems like a problem that’s already solved, if you really don’t want to use YouTube. Big channels that get millions of views are the real issue.
Self-hosting, certainly (to a degree anyway). But the Fediverse isn’t self-hosted. I’m not keeping a catalog of comments on my computer that you lose access to when I close my laptop.
Self-hosting also tends to require dedicated hardware. Less of a big deal as the real cost of your own personal little server setup has plummeted. But still something that’s predicated on always-on internet connectivity in a way that’s not always practical.
It’s not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:
- Resolution
- Frame rate
- Quality
- Bit rate (file size)
- Encoding complexity
- Decoding complexity (which affects battery life of mobile devices viewing the content)
- Robustness for dropped or corrupted data
Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).
Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that’s 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that’s 100 terabytes of traffic saved.
But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they’re ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.
Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid’s birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it’s on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.
If a service doesn’t scale, it won’t be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.
Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit.
Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I’ll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That’s only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I’ll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running.
Indeed. Yet they still add stupid features like 8K video and high-bitrate 1080p. What the heck are they doing? Who needs more then 720p anyways?
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
Or that’s what we’re led to believe. Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives. We need an open source alternative to YouTube, and perhaps with some innovation that may be possible. You don’t need storage, for example, if content is just streamed in a p2p manner, even with a time delay so people can watch something whenever
Edit: some context https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2PTV
For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills
Your equating the software development with the running costs.
People have made OS and people have made YouTube alternatives. But that’s nothing compared to the quantity of servers, networking infrastructure, storage, power usage, and labor to maintain and update it.
P2p isn’t a valid alternative because that’s just shifting costs onto your users. Just because a central entity isn’t taking on the burden of cost doesn’t mean the cost isn’t there.
Pictures and text are rather low usage, both in storage and networking but video isn’t. Especially when millions are watching videos at the same time.
What you’re saying is valid in a model where the server hosts content and provides it on demand, and that’s not what I was describing.
Here’s the model I had in my head, but I am not sure if anyone has attempted this yet:
1…user uploads a video which borrows resources from p2p network
2…the shared burden is shifted around as nodes become active or inactive
3…content is always available in asynchronous, on demand fashion
I don’t work in distributed and networked systems, so I don’t expect the above model to strictly be based in reality, but it’s not that fanciful based on the wiki article I shared
I guess it’s a fair point that users maybe don’t want to be responsible for the burden. In which case, I guess why complain about ads then 🤷♀️
Maybe if we would stop expecting these sites to provide wasteful ultra-huge megaHD videos, it wouldn’t be a problem. Hell, even with YouTube, maybe if they just served DVD-quality videos they wouldn’t need to push tons of ads on us in the first place. Our expectation for this crazy new pointless ultra-sharp quality videos is ridiculous and is part of the problem with content delivery these days.
Not downvoting, but I just think you’re way too optimistic. It’s like believing we, humans, could stop fighting wars. Sure, theoretically. But the difference between theory and the practical is that in theory there’s no difference.
Hmm not being optimistic, just going based on past experience. Look at where you’re posting right now, did anyone think the fediverse could be a possibility when we have twitter, fb or reddit? There’s nothing out of the norm about what I am saying anyways, people do stuff like this for sport or based on ideology. That’s why anyone should support a foss project they use or admire, or pay artists, writers, niche magazines etc
For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills
Fuck you.
Storage and maintenance. OSes are miniscule in comparison to the data YouTube stores, we’re in the multiple exabyte range here. Someone’s got to pay for it somewhere. Floatplane might be a decent comparison as to what a FOSS YouTube might look like - they have a dedicated dev team and charge per channel to view, following more than a couple of creators would become cost prohibitive for me personally.
You absolutely need storage in a P2P network, the data doesn’t just magic into existence, not only that but if there are insufficient peers in the network then you’re not watching the video, smaller creators and older content would likely suffer as a result.
peertube uses webtorrents. it’s viable. it works. owncast is fully self-hosted. it works. all the people downvoting are repeating a talking point, and have never implemented these projects.
We can barely keep Mastodon / Lemmy instnaces floating that host text, gifs and pictures.
That doesn’t include paying the content creators.
Just because you’re getting shit for free, doesn’t mean that other people will want to do it for you for free.
Fuck you.
Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives.
An OS requires significantly less resources. The only online features you need for an OS is a website to market the OS and host ISO’s. Then you need a server to distribute packages to users. Packages which are significantly smaller then HD or 4K videos
Considering I remember some project in the past tried something like that in the past and found that because you can’t control when people log off you can’t guarantee files will transfer in one piece not to mention how expensive it was having everyone’s computer constantly using Internet and computing stuff. For that reason I think the main problem here is that we are trying to centralize video sharing onto one platform. I instead propose we encourage people to make their own platforms. Like if you want to watch idk PewDiePie you go to PewDiePie.com and encourage people to explore the Internet instead of just sitting on one site. I suppose as a step in the right direction I propose that we get people to make online data bases using laptops/desktops that have nothing but xzamp and the videos you wish to upload to the web. Then we all collectively promote a sort of aggregation site that promotes everyones videos that way the aggregation site only has to store a bunch of hyperlinks and handle all the traffic while you the content creator just have to handle the traffic your content generates now the only challenge is making this idea profitable because if content creators can’t profit few if any will make content and if the aggregation platform can’t break eaven then we are back to square one of no one knowing where to look for content.
For that reason I think the main problem here is that we are trying to centralize video sharing onto one platform. I instead propose we encourage people to make their own platforms. Like if you want to watch idk PewDiePie you go to PewDiePie.com and encourage people to explore the Internet instead of just sitting on one site.
Basically old web but with aggregators, I don’t hate it. I think there needs to be a way to alleviate burden from content creators in a way. Tbh, maybe we need community server farms which are jointly supported, like community gardens in a way
All this enshittification might be good for me. I think i might start reading more books instead of watching youtube. Fuck you google, I’ll never buy yt premium nor watch you ads.
Yeah that’s what I did when reddit shit the bed. I’m spending the free time with books and getting back into gaming. It’s an improvement really.
Many physical books have ads in the beginning and end. I would dare to say all. At the very least, a small “banner” ad for the publisher on one page.
$13.99/mo is pretty steep, and realistically I’d have to get it for my wife too which effectively doubles the price and would make it the most expensive streaming service I’ve ever subscribed to (behind SeriusXM which at least has to finance literal satellites in space and delivers me radio when I’m in dead zones with no cell towers). More than my budget right now will allow for sure (I just cancelled every subscription after rechecking my budget)
